The State of MSP Project Delivery 2026
What the numbers say about how managed service providers plan, staff, and ship IT projects — and where delivery breaks down.
Managed service providers live or die on delivery. Yet most MSPs plan projects in a PSA module built for tickets, staff them from the same bench that answers the help desk, and find out a go-live has slipped only when the client asks. This report pulls together what credible, published industry data says about the state of MSP project delivery — and where the gaps are.
Every figure below is cited to its source. Where a statistic couldn't be verified against a primary source, it was left out.
The market MSPs sell into is large and compounding double digits — a rising tide, but one that invites the competition and consolidation MSPs now cite as a top concern.
Canalys managed-services market data (2024)Independent forecasts put the market on track to roughly double by decade's end — demand, not demand generation, is the MSP tailwind.
Grand View Research (2025)By organizations' own reporting, roughly one in four projects fails to deliver what it set out to. Delivery, not sales, is the industry's soft spot.
PMI Pulse of the Profession 2024 (2024)Scope creep is the most-cited mechanism of slippage, and it's controllable: the best-run organizations hold it to 23% of projects while the worst let it reach 37%.
PMI Pulse of the Profession 2024 (2024)When projects fail they don't just miss goals — they burn roughly a quarter of their budget, money that flows straight off an MSP's already-thin project margin.
PMI Pulse of the Profession 2024 (2024)Across a 16,000+ project database spanning IT, construction and more, landing a project cleanly is statistically rare — the norm is over-time, over-budget, under-benefit.
Bent Flyvbjerg, 'How Big Things Get Done' (Oxford database) (2023)Utilization sits below the long-standing 75% target — the gap between billed and paid hours is where services profit quietly leaks, and it caps how many projects a bench can deliver.
SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark (2023)PSA/tooling is a proven lever, not overhead: nearly 90% of high-performing services firms run a PSA, and adopters post materially higher utilization, project margin and EBITDA.
2024 SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark (Kantata) (2024)The MSP-specific proof point: as project pipelines thinned, technician utilization fell and project margins nearly halved in a single year. Capacity planning is now a profitability issue.
Service Leadership Index Q4 2024 (ConnectWise) (2025)Co-managed IT is now mainstream, not niche — the majority of MSP project work happens shoulder-to-shoulder with an in-house team, raising the bar for shared visibility and coordination.
Datto/Kaseya State of the MSP Industry (2025 Look Ahead) (2024)The number-one reason clients hire MSPs is an internal skills/capacity gap — the exact condition that drives co-managed engagements and dependency-heavy project work.
Datto/Kaseya State of the MSP Industry (2025 Look Ahead) (2024)After a 2023 slump, dealmaking rebounded sharply as platform consolidators bought scale — pushing independent MSPs to professionalize operations to compete or become attractive targets.
Canalys / Jay McBain (via Channel Futures) (2024)A big, growing market — but the easy growth is over
The managed-services market was worth roughly $488B in 2023 and is forecast to keep growing 12%+ annually toward $731B by 2030 (14.1% CAGR). Yet by late 2024, ConnectWise's Service Leadership Index showed managed-services revenue growth slowing to about 1% per quarter even as average MSP EBITDA held near 11.1%. The tide is still rising, but future growth comes from doing more (and better) per client — not from a frictionless flood of new logos.
Projects are the industry's weakest link
Delivery, not sales, is where value leaks. Flyvbjerg's 16,000+ project database finds only 8.5% of projects finish on time and on budget, and a mere 0.5% deliver on time, on budget, and on benefits. PMI's 2024 data echoes it from the client side: on average only 73.8% of an organization's projects meet their business goals — meaning about a quarter miss. For MSPs whose referrals ride on delivered outcomes, this is the gap worth closing.
Scope creep and budget leakage are controllable, not inevitable
PMI shows scope creep hits about 30% of projects on average, and failed projects burn roughly 26% of their budget. The spread is enormous: top-quartile performers hold scope creep to 23% of projects and budget loss to 20%, while bottom-quartile organizations see 37% and 29%. The difference tracks with structure — disciplined scoping, dependency awareness, and defined delivery practices — exactly what a purpose-built project module is meant to enforce.
Technician utilization is where project profit is won or lost
Professional-services utilization sits around 68.9%, below the 75% target — and for MSPs the cost of that gap is now vivid: ConnectWise reported MSP project-services gross margins collapsing from 23% to 12.9% in a single year, driven specifically by lower project-team utilization as pipelines thinned. When technicians sit idle or are poorly scheduled against dependencies, project margin evaporates. Resource-aware scheduling and capacity planning are no longer nice-to-haves; they are the margin.
Tooling is a measurable multiplier
The gap between firms that run a PSA/project platform and those that don't is stark: SPI's 2024 benchmark finds PSA adopters post about 10% higher billable utilization, 24% higher project margin, and 28% higher EBITDA, and nearly 90% of high-performing services firms use one. MSPs agree in principle — 85% call automation a 'must-have' in Kaseya's benchmark — but the value only materializes when the tooling actually governs scheduling, dependencies, and time-to-billing rather than sitting alongside spreadsheets.
Co-managed IT and consolidation are reshaping the work
83% of MSPs now offer co-managed IT, and the top reason clients hire an MSP (61%) is lacking sufficient in-house expertise — so a growing share of project work happens jointly with a client's internal team, raising the stakes on shared visibility. Simultaneously, MSP-channel M&A rebounded roughly 50% in 2024 as consolidators bought scale. Both trends reward MSPs that can demonstrate mature, repeatable project delivery — to co-managed clients and acquirers alike.
Methodology
Figures are drawn from publicly available industry research, each cited inline. PMI (Pulse of the Profession 2024) and Datto/Kaseya (State of the MSP Industry, 1,000+ MSPs surveyed) figures were read directly from the primary reports; Grand View Research, ConnectWise's Service Leadership Index, and the SPI/Kantata benchmark were confirmed on the publishers' own pages. Where a statistic couldn't be verified against a primary source, it was left out — including the frequently-cited Standish CHAOS report, whose sample frame is unpublished. This is a synthesis of third-party data, not a Current customer study; we'll say so clearly if and when we add first-party ITPartners+ benchmarks.
Sources
- 1.PMI — Pulse of the Profession 2024 — pmi.org
- 2.Datto/Kaseya — State of the MSP Industry (2025 Look Ahead) — datto.com
- 3.ConnectWise — Service Leadership Index, Q4 2024 — connectwise.com
- 4.Kantata / SPI — 2024 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark — kantata.com
- 5.Grand View Research — Managed Services Market forecast — grandviewresearch.com
- 6.Bent Flyvbjerg — 'How Big Things Get Done' (Oxford project database) — thoughteconomics.com